Virgil's Schoolboys

The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England

Andrew Wallace

Description

Virgil's Schoolboys adds a new layer of complexity to Virgil's already complex pedagogical afterlife. Reading the ancient Roman poet as an adventurous theorist of instruction, Andrew Wallace examines the relationship between his serial meditations on teaching in the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, and the pedagogical theories and practices that dominated the spaces in which his poems came to be taught in the grammar schools of Renaissance England. Wallace argues not only that Virgil was a keen student of the elusive operations of instruction, but that vitae and scholia from antiquity to the Renaissance preserve a broad range of fractured acknowledgements that pedagogical questions supply his poems with their characteristic intellectual texture. In grammar schools all across Renaissance England 'the book of Maro' was a gateway to upper-form studies of the auctores. Even more significantly, it was a gateway to some of humanist pedagogy's most self-conscious meditations on the promise and fragility of the educational project.

Author Information

Virgil's Schoolboys

The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England

Andrew Wallace

Reviews and Awards

"This is a relatively short book, but it packs a great deal of erudition into its pages. Wallace shares his deep knowledge of both Virgil's texts and the landscape of early modern English learning, both inside and outside the classroom. Wallace's style is straightforward and even eloquent. Most impressive is his sympathy for this subjects of both Virgil and pedagogy. Virgil's Schoolboys evokes well the longings and the pleasures inherent in the acts of both teaching and learning." --Bryn Mawr Classical Review